We are thrilled to announce that two of our authors are finalists for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature - Jorie Graham with Fast and Abdellatif Labbi with Beyond the Barbed Wire.

The Neustadt International Prize for Literature is a biennial award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today since 1970. It is the first international literary award of this scope to originate in the United States and one of few international prizes for which poets, novelists, and playwrights are equally eligible.

The Prize consists of $50,000, a replica of an eagle feather cast in silver, and a certificate. A generous endowment from the Neustadt family of Ardmore, Oklahoma, and Dallas, Texas, ensures the award in perpetuity. The winner will be announced on October 16th at the 2019 Neustadt Lit Fest.

You can see the full list of finalists here.

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently FAST (2017) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Abdellatif Laâbi is a poet, novelist, playwright, translator and political activist. He was born in Fez, Morocco in 1942. In the 1960s, Laâbi was the founding editor of Souffles, or Breaths, a widely influential literary review that was banned in 1972, at which point Laâbi was imprisoned for eight and a half years. Laâbi’s most recent accolades include the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie for his Oeuvres complètes (Collected Poems) in 2009, and the Académie française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2011.

Massive congratulations to Jorie and Abdellatif!